scrivello /skri-VEL-oh/. noun. A small elephant tusk weighing “less than 20 lb,” according to the OED or “of a small size commonly used for making billiard balls” by Merriam-Webster. Likely from the Portuguese, a variant of escaravelho (pin, peg).[Read more…]

Today in 1934, in United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, U.S. Appeals Court judges Learned Hand and Augustus Hand (cousins and a story in their own right: Augustus had a hand in some of the court’s most famous rulings on censorship and contraceptives, while Learned is the most frequently cited lower-court judge in Supreme Court history) rule that Joyce’s famous novel was not obscene or libidinous and therefore not pornographic. The ruling makes for interesting reading. Really. A bit of the flavor:

“The net effect even of portions most open to attack, such as the closing monologue of the wife of Leopold Bloom, is pitiful and tragic, rather than lustful. The book depicts the souls of men and women that are by turns bewildered and keenly apprehensive, sordid and aspiring, ugly and beautiful, hateful and loving. In the end one feels, more than anything else, pity and sorrow for the confusion, misery, and degradation of humanity. Page after page of the book is, or seems to be, incomprehensible. But many passages show the trained hand of an artist, who can at one moment adapt to perfection the style of an ancient chronicler, and at another become a veritable personification of Thomas Carlyle. In numerous places there are found originality, beauty, and distinction […] Indeed, it may be questioned whether the obscene passages in Romeo and Juliet were as necessary to the development of the play as those in the monologue of Mrs. Bloom are to the depiction of the latter’s tortured soul.”